One digital video broadcasting standard that has been developed for TV sets and set-top boxes is the digital video broadcasting-terrestrial standard DVB-T.
A recent variation of the DVB-T standard that has been adopted to incorporate enhanced features to allow improved reception of digital video broadcasting services for mobile devices is the digital video broadcasting-handset DVB-H standard. One feature that has been incorporated within the DVB-H standard that facilitates this aim is the use of multi protocol encapsulated-forward error correction MPE-FEC. MPE-FEC allows recovery of data by a receiver in situations of high packet loss, which can occur when a receiver is in a changing environment, for example when a receiver is moving.
Associated with the use of MPE-FEC within a DVB-H system, however, is the need for a receiving device to be able to receive relatively large data frames, where each data frame corresponds to a MPE-FEC frame, to be able to perform interleaving of the data, Reed-Solomon error correction and associated deinterleaving of the data.
For example, a receiver operating within a DVB-H compatible system could receive a MPE-FEC frame with up to 2 Mbit (i.e. 250 kbytes) of data over a single channel in a relatively short time period, for example 200 millisecond. If a multi service environment existed additional channels may be required.
FIG. 1 illustrates a typical DVB-H compliant wireless mobile device 10 having a tuner 11 arranged to receive a radio frequency signal, for example a VHF or UHF signal, which is down converted to a base band signal and provided to a base band receiver 12. The receiver 12 is arranged to recover an MPEG-2 data transport stream from the received data, which involves storing a received MPE-FEC frame in a memory module 13 coupled to the receiver 12, and for the receiver 12 to extract interleaved data words from the memory and performing Reed-Solomon error correction on the data, where typically the receiver 12 will be a dedicated hardware module/chip (e.g. an ASIC) to achieve the processing speed required to perform the error correction. The error corrected data words are then placed back into the respective MPE-FEC frame in the memory module 13, the recovered MPEG-2 data stream is then passed to the wireless device's application processor 14, which is formed on a separate chip to that of the receiver 12, which demultiplexes and decodes the MPEG-2 transport stream and transfers the recovered data via the processor's 14 internet protocol stack to the application software, for example a media player 16.
However, this implementation results in additional memory being required by the receiver to store the received MPE-FEC frames, which can result in an increase in power consumption, an increase in cost and an increase in size of the mobile device.
It is desirable to improve this situation.